The answer is ARRAS, five letters. An arras is a woven tapestry hung on a wall, named for the town in northern France whose weavers made the form famous. If your slot has eight squares, the plain word TAPESTRY is the answer instead; the Telegraph’s quick crossword has printed Wall hanging with that very solution.
The town that turned into a word
Arras is a real place, the prefecture of the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. By the fourteenth century its cloth trade had made it famous for fine tapestries, so famous that English and Italian both adopted the town’s name for tapestries in general. The English word arrived in the late 1300s from the Anglo-French draps d’arras, cloth of Arras, and it came to mean a pictured tapestry used to cover the walls of a room.
The town’s own name goes back further, to the Atrebates, a tribe of the Belgae who lived in the region. Crossword clues use both halves of the word’s life. Some ask for the hanging and some ask for the French town, so a five-square clue about northern France is often the same answer wearing a different hat.
Polonius and the curtain in Hamlet
The reason ARRAS feels familiar to so many solvers is Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Polonius hides behind an arras in Gertrude’s room to eavesdrop, and Hamlet, hearing a voice and taking it for the king’s, stabs through the cloth and kills him. Earlier in the play Polonius announces the plan with the line Behind the arras I’ll convey myself, and the LA Times has printed that line with ARRAS left blank for solvers to supply. Other grids clue the word through the scene itself, as the hanging through which Hamlet stabs Polonius.
Some clues play it for laughs. Universal once clued ARRAS as It was curtains for Polonius, and other puzzles reach it through Flight to Arras, the 1942 book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Hangings for every slot length
Most of these are ordinary words, so the length does nearly all the work.
| Letters | Answer | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | ART | Anything framed, in easy grids |
| 3 | OIL | A painting, named by medium |
| 5 | ARRAS | The classic tapestry answer |
| 5 | TAPIS | Older grids, tapestry or carpet |
| 6 | MIRROR | Useful rather than decorative |
| 6 | POSTER | Printed art |
| 7 | MACRAME | Knotted cord work |
| 7 | DRAPERY | Cloth hung in folds |
| 8 | TAPESTRY | The plain modern word |
| 8 | PORTRAIT | A painted likeness |
| 8 | CALENDAR | The practical choice |
One older grid even used GOBELIN TAPESTRY, fifteen letters, named for the Gobelins manufactory in Paris, a historic tapestry factory that grew from a medieval dyeing business run by the Gobelin family.
Tapis and tapestry began as one carpet
TAPIS is the five-letter answer older puzzles reach for. It means a tapestry or carpet, and historically it also named the cloth covering a council table. The old idiom on the tapis, meaning under discussion, uses the same word, and French has a matching phrase, mettre sur le tapis. TAPESTRY comes from the same source. Old French tapis, heavy fabric, gave tapisser, to cover with heavy fabric, and then tapisserie, and English added a T that has no etymological business being there.
A nineteenth-century American dictionary drew the technical line neatly. In a true tapestry the colored threads are not thrown with a shuttle, as in ordinary weaving, but put in one by one with a needle. MACRAME, the seven-letter option, is newer as a word than as a craft. English borrowed it from French in 1865, reportedly from a Turkish word for a towel or napkin.
The tapestry hidden inside embarrass
Look closely at embarrass and you will find arras sitting inside it, in letters four through eight. British cryptic setters have noticed, and the Sun and the Guardian have both run clues such as Embarrassed to display tapestry, which hide the answer inside a longer word. You will not need that trick for a plain definition clue, but it is a reminder of how ordinary the letters are. Two A’s, two R’s and an S are all common in English, which makes ARRAS easy to cross.
Frequently asked questions
Is the answer ARRAS or TAPESTRY?
Both are correct, so count the squares. ARRAS takes five and is the traditional crossword answer, while TAPESTRY takes eight and is the plain modern word. An arras is simply a tapestry named after the French town of Arras, where fine ones were woven.
Why is an arras connected to Hamlet?
In Hamlet, Polonius hides behind an arras to eavesdrop on Hamlet and his mother, and Hamlet stabs through it. Crosswords lean on the scene, cluing ARRAS as the hiding place of Polonius or quoting his line about conveying himself behind it.
What is another five letter word for wall hanging?
TAPIS also fits five squares. It is an older word for a tapestry or carpet, borrowed from French, and it shows up mostly in older puzzles. Everyday options such as POSTER and MIRROR need six squares instead, and TAPESTRY needs eight.
